Friday, August 12, 2021 9:35 AM

made tea
poured my bath water
begin a day
no silence in my head this morning

the pond after the event

still

Basho’s frog
splash
water

And when this life, this me, this I, is gone, the manifest universe will be still... A play on the English word.

The version of the old master’s masterpiece:

Furu-ike ya
kawazu tobi-komu
mizu-no-oto

I made last night at Om Shan Tea.

Note on the poem:

So, I include the date at the beginning of the poem to signify that the particular instant in time is pertinent as is each and every instant a unique trait of every event. I put the original author’s name in his poem to place the poem with regard to the person who made it. Then I provide an interpretation that came to me this morning – one that has not occurred to me before in the forty-six years I engaged Basho’s poem. Finally, the two aspects of my poem that derive from reading Ezra Pound’s Cantos: [1] the comment in the poem about poetic technique, that is, the use of a pun, and [2] inclusion of a transliteration of the original Japanese text, so my reader can go back to the source, even if I can’t read Japanese.

Peter